Gilbane Group Blog: BPM - Business Process Management Archives

January 5, 2007

Checking in on the ECM-BPM Intersection

2006 convergence and consolidation in the ECM market undoubtedly validated "the infrastructure players are moving in" expectations -- in a big way. Press and analysis on the IBM's FileNet acquisition as well as Oracle's Stellent acquisition is still ongoing. Not to be discounted, the OpenText's summer coup over Symphony in winning Hummingbird validates that pure-play ECM suite vendors will not simply fade away anytime soon. IMO, neither will many of the pure-play WCM, RM or DAM vendors, several of which are shrewdly riding the crest of SaaS.

And never to be discounted is Microsoft, whose vision for MOSS 2007 is to be "as pervasive as the Office suite." The company is certainly turning up the volume in terms of positioning business intelligence/process management, content management and collaboration as synonymous.

So, is this "technology trio" 100% new and innovative? Well...not for customers of FileNet, whose BPM capabilities were more than likely the crown jewel for IBM's successful pursuit. And not for customers of Adobe's LiveCycle products, who benefited from a major product line upgrade in September along with the release of Acrobat 8. And not for customers of EMC's Documentum Process Suite, who take advantage of "the automation of high-volume transactional processes and complex collaborative processes" according to product descriptions. And certainly not if you have been following our ECM-BPM intersection discussions.

Will ECM convergence and consolidation raise the market awareness and visibility of content-centric BPM?

More than likely. However, the ECM market certainly can't take all the credit. Let's not forget the achievements of BPM suite vendors in 2006, who continue in their efforts to bridge the divide between data-driven versus content-driven business process management. This is a tall order, given the need to overcome the holy grail of all "divides" -- IT versus the business -- especially given "do not cross" domains for skill sets such as process modeling.

Still, vendors such as Appian, Savvion, Intalio, and others tout ease of use and graphical process modelers targeted to business users. Vendors such as BEA (via the Fuego acquisition,) Lombardi, Ultimus, and Pegasystems stress support for interactive workflows, business-driven usability, and provide direct integration with selected ECM solutions (including Sharepoint.) Vendors such as Global360 provide baseline document and records management capabilities, but shy away from describing them as ECM capabilities. And most if not all BPM suite vendors provide case management support such as attaching and keeping track of documents for vertical-specific processes that require it.

Consider these examples as a sign of deeper capabilities and integrations to come or even more interesting -- markets that merge in 2007.

Side note: examples are simply that, and not an exhaustive list. Feel free to comment or even better, we invite CTOs from any type of organization to weigh in on this and other subjects on our CTO Blog. Send an email to ctoblog@gilbane.com if you'd like to start contributing!

Posted by Leonor Ciarlone at 10:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 30, 2006

When Web Sites Go Bad

Is your web site any good?

I bet that question made a lot of you cringe and start down a guilt spiral of rationalizations about why your web site isn’t really quite what you wish it was. If you have a bad web site, it’s because your organization is producing a bad web site. And no one who is visiting your site cares why. They don’t care about the bickering between marketing and IT over web site control. They don’t care about the 18-month argument about who gets a link on the homepage, or about the 30 years of history which makes it “impossible” for all the various programs and offices in your organization to cooperate in order to create the integrated web presence that your site visitors long for. They don’t care. But, everyday they are clicking away on your site, frustrated, trying to do business with your organization and trying to get information from your organization. And your organization continues to dither. By rationalizing low quality, you are prioritizing your organization’s bad habits over your customer’s and constituent’s needs.

For a business or an organization with a clearly articulated mission, the intent and purpose of its web site(s) should be obvious—expressed most clearly as a high quality web product. The mission should also be front and center for those producing the organization’s web site(s)- expressed as a coherent set of strategic policies and tactical standards for web site product development. But, we all know this is seldom the case. Web site quality is frequently at the mercy of some set of ill-thought-out, status quo web production processes and a lack of strategic oversight by senior management. All this for what is most likely the first point of contact for individuals interacting with your organization.

Ten years into mainstream web site development, it’s time to take a step back and assess your organization’s web operational competence and build a solid bridge between the strategic intent of the organization and the execution of that strategic intent on the web. Most organizations know how to create quality communications products and deploy effective IT applications. They’ve been doing it for years. They just need to apply some of the same effective operational and quality practices to the development of their web products. The web isn’t “new” anymore. So, there’s no excuse for settling for a low quality, badly managed web product. Creating a high-quality web product includes:

Setting measurable, strategic goals for the site(s),
Setting and enforcing web policies and standards,
Creating user-centered web site information architectures and graphical user interfaces, and web applications,
Developing sensible, scalable web publishing and application development processes, and
Finding the right set of web infrastructure tools to support the operations of your web site.

If you have a big mess of a web site, then I’m sorry for you. I’ve worked on a few of those and it’s a frustrating experience. But it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get that site back under control—or perhaps in control for the first time. Anticipate that this may take some time – perhaps a few years; but, when you think about how long it took to get your web site into the state that it’s in right now, this shouldn’t be a surprise.

Moving from a reactive, project-by-project web production paradigm to a proactive operationally-focused web management paradigm is not easy. When planning, make sure that you avoid the mistakes of the past. The most common mistake is not having a cross-functional planning team in place to make informed choices about what needs to happen on the web site. Any web strategic planning team should include a balance of communications and technical resources along with content subject matter experts. Web operations planning without one of these key view points will lead to the development of a low-quality web product because a web site, by its very nature, is a content-rich, communications and transactional vehicle delivered on a technology platform.

Moving from “reactive” to “proactive” web operations management requires some work. A good approach to web operational planning is to outline your ‘as-is” state and define your key objectives in each of the following areas:

Strategy & Governance: Defining the strategic intent of the site as well as the policies and standards by which it will be run.
Content, Data & Applications: Designing the best approach to meeting the strategic objectives through the proper creation and structuring of content, data and applications.
Process & Workflow: Determining how best to produce your web product.
Tools & Infrastructure: Selecting, architecting and implementing the technology platform which will support your web product.

I’ve found that this structured approach to web operational planning leads to a higher quality web product and less organizational churn regarding web site development. It’s not a quick fix though. But it is a permanent fix because it focuses not on fixing one discrete web site problem – such as an inappropriate graphical user interface design. But instead addresses the organizational operational problems that caused the deployment of inappropriate design in the first place. Focusing on web operations management holistically will position an organization to react to changes in web technologies and content requirements as they arise but also ensure that what gets generated is of high quality--- now and in the future.

For more on Web Operations Management there’s a primer at: http://www.welchmanconsulting.com/articles/WOM_v4.pdf and you and register for my half-day Web Operations Management tutorial at the Gilbane Conference in Boston on November 28th. http://gilbaneboston.com/Conference-Tutorials.html#tutorialb

Posted by Lisa Welchman at 4:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 26, 2006

ECM/BPM: More Than Simple Workflow Update

For those of you interested in the conversation about defining more than simple workflow, the WS-BPEL 2.0 Specification public review period started on September 10 and ends November 9. (HTML version)

Microsoft architect John Evdemon is the co-chair of this OASIS committee and has all related links for the specification on his Loosely Coupled Thinking blog. Bruce Silver's BPMS Watch, Ismael Ghalimi's IT/Redux, and the BPEL section of ITtoolbox Blogs are good sources for perspective.

Posted by Leonor Ciarlone at 1:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 24, 2006

What is Document Composition?

Your definition of "document composition" will largely depend on your perspective.

A graphic designer might immediately think of Quark Express or Adobe InDesign. A desktop publisher could probably name various plug-ins to those environments or perhaps list database-publishing tools like Corel Ventura or Adobe PageMaker. If you are approaching this question from an operations, IT or print production perspective you have a much longer and more granular continuum of needs which can only be met with high volume composition software. In my work, I deal with both ends of the continuum from the graphic designer to the high-volume output specialist (see www.ArtPlusTechnology.com)

Composition products range in their ability to design documents from static to dynamic, and it can be generally stated that the more dynamic the document, the less fine control you have of layout, layering and color management. Beyond static page layout and database publishing tools are two categories of composition solution that begin to bring marketing, operations and IT needs together.

• Variable Data Print (VDP): tools geared to one-to-one print marketing primarily targeted at print shops with digital presses
• High Volume or Transactional Composition: the “big rigs.” These are the tools that use business rules to transform data into dynamic documents for a variety of print and electronic media.

The high-volume composition products did not start off with even a tip of the hat to marketing. The long-time leaders evolved from one of four major categories:

1. Report Writers – high volume sys out and other reports of which statements & transaction confirmations were once considered a part. Example Metavante CSF circa 1990
2. Typesetters or Page Layout – These products were focused on batch creation of forms documents that needed fine typographic control along with merged text. Example: Document Sciences Compuset (ne XICS) circa 1990
3. Assembly Tools – these tools were typically used in concert with page layout tools and provided the rules-based merge engine to bring together various forms and other resource to create policies, contracts and the like. Example: DocuCorp DocuMerge cira 1985
4. Correspondence – rule based correspondence generation often linked by a user interface to call-center or sales personnel. Example: Napersoft circa 1989.

Major players who have been producing composition software since the early 1990’s or before include:

DocuCorp www.DocuCorp.com
Document Sciences www.DocSciences.com
Group1 (Pitney Bowes) www.G1.com
Isis Papyrus www.Isis-Papyrus.com
PrintSoft www.PrintSoft.com
Metavante www.Metavante.com

These days, many of the leaders are sunsetting their traditional products and launching new products that attempt to serve all four categories and drive output to both print and online channels. More and more, the desire to reach marketing users (and their budgets) is driving their product requirements.

Some of the key developments in the evolution of these products since the early 1990’s include the introduction of proportional fonts, data-driven graphics, graphical user interfaces (most of these tools did not have UI’s when first introduced), marketing campaign and message tools, post-processing tools for intelligent sorting and postal management. Some of the many tools that have established themselves in the market since the late 90’s include:

Elixir Technologies www.Elixir.com
Exstream Software www.Exstream.com
GMC Software www.GMC.net
Sefas Innovation www.Sefas.com

While these products are trying to serve broader audiences and layer more and more into their solutions, new players are emerging that go back to the approach of trying to do one thing well. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s not clear what that one thing is. With no slight to their products intended, I find it challenging to place tools like XMPie and PageFlex into the continuum above. There are many other products that are not listed here that are targeted to very specific document types or vertical industries. I will drill down on some of those in future entries.

Meanwhile, I would be interested in feedback on the products that you are most familiar with and how you categorize them.

Elizabeth

Posted by Elizabeth Gooding at 8:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 31, 2006

The ECM/BPM Intersection: Infrastructure versus Solutions

The summer of '06 gave credence to the notion that multiple ECM and BPM suite vendors are preparing for the business buyer at the ECM/BPM intersection. Examples include:

June's announcements included EMC/Documentum's acquisition of ProActivity, Metastorm's integration with Documentum, Hummingbird, Interwoven and Meridio -- quickly followed by a major upgrade of its BPMS suite, which includes a strong focus on strengthening its Sharepoint integration. Not to be outdone, Ultimus announced its iBAM Suite, targeting non-technical business users who need visibility into BPM-enabled business processes. The tagline? "Go from Zero to BAM in less than 10 minutes."

July's announcements included one from the open source community, a hot arena across all content technology categories. Describing its offering as the first Zero-Code BPMS, Intalio describes its BPMS 4.2 product as ideal for "complex business processes that include Web Services orchestration and web-based human workflow."

August's IBM-FileNet merger got lots of press and continues to focus on "synergistic BPM technologies." Although this news seemed to overshadow the Oracle-IDS Scheer partnership, this announcement also deserves attention for those following the chase between Oracle, IBM and Tibco Software (who seems to have finally made significant progress in 2006 on maximizing its 2004 Staffware acquisition.

These "catch up" summer activities are strong signals to competing vendors already traveling the path toward meeting the requirements of complex business processes that must combine data-centric BPM integrations (including SOA) with content-centric, human-driven interactions. Players with earlier investments or partnerships supporting this roadmap include BEA's Fuego acquisition in March, the Vignette-Lombardi alliance in April, Interwoven's strategy to bolster visibility for its Fujitsu partnership, and Global 360's steady progress toward "bridging the islands of process automation across BPM, transaction management, ERP and content management systems" by integrating its G360 EX and G360 BOS products.

Now comes the fall and expectations for 2007 products that are not simply infrastructure-ready, but rather solution-specific ready. It is our belief that applying integrated ECM/BPM solutions to real-world issues requires the ability to handle hybrid, complex, and high-volume processes in a manner that enables rapid deployment through ease of use and pre-packaging of vertical or horizontally-specific capabilities including workflow, modeling objects, business rules, and end-user dashboards for monitoring and analytics. This will be critical to vertical uptake in industries such as Banking, Insurance and Telecommunications as well as horizontal arenas such as compliance, claims processing, accounts payable, and human resources.

Some vendors can already point to these capabilities, which ultimately cross the unstructured content and structured data worlds; Others are well on their way to demonstrating them. The fall of 2006 should be an interesting quarter.

Posted by Leonor Ciarlone at 12:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 15, 2006

Big news indeed

Update: Promoted from comment to Frank's one-liner.
Big news indeed, and in fact IBM's fourth largest acquisition of any kind - ever - according to the AP. One of the more compelling takeaways from the analyst conference call is the effect on the market's ability to deliver cohesive vertical and horizontal solutions in the ECM-BPM intersection. (blog archive)

FileNet and IBM reps repeatedly stressed their ability to "provide content-centric BPM in the context of business processes." Not hard to envision. FileNet's historical investment in its BPM modules is a large part of its competitive differentiation. On equal par from a SOA/BPEL-driven perspective, IBM's v6 Websphere BPM products provide the STP/integration capabilities for the sibling requirements. The opportunity for a technology merge is intriguing. Fully preparing for the intersection is clearly a primary goal; as per the call, "the timing is good for a combination of forces." I wouldn't call it a smooth road however, despite the promises of "nothing but goodness for everyone."

Although the two former partners and competitors stress the "preservation and enhancement" of both ECM platforms (the ECM divisions will become one), the holy grail of post-acquisition integration (culture, technology & strategy) could be quite significant in this case.

Posted by Leonor Ciarlone at 2:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 10, 2006

IBM to Acquire FileNet

More when I'm not on vacation, but obviously this is big news.

Posted by Frank Gilbane at 11:55 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 26, 2006

The ECM and BPM Intersection: Putting the Business in BPM

We've been talking with users lately on what the promise of "technology for the masses" really means for the BPM suite market. And more specifically, how BPM technologies will evolve to compliment ECM strategies and implementations. The flavor of many of these discussions comes down to transitioning "x" amount of design, control and execution from IT into the hands of "process-savvy but less-technical" corporate domains.

In other words, transferring capabilities into the business -- thereby creating BPM environments that eliminate throwing applications over the wall and then spending precious resource dollars to manage the inevitable boatload of change requests thrown back. According to Howard Smith and Peter Fingar, authors of Business Process Management: The Third Wave, the challenge for leading corporations is not to bridge the business-IT divide, but rather to obliterate it.

These conversations are familiar to content specialists and information architects who demanded the evolution of content technologies such as WCM from programmer-centric environments to business-driven applications that required little IT maintenance. In fact, "non-IT" buyers became more and more important on the radar screens of WCM vendors during the mid to late 90's as content management went mainstream. Budgeting, evaluation, and approval teams were a mix of marketing, sales and IT personnel. C-level executives were primary decision-makers and had efficiency, cost reduction, and revenue generation on their checklists. The corporate desire to move from centralized control to decentralized collaboration was paramount. Desktop features, Web-based interfaces, templates, and coaches/wizards were hot.

The content technologies market learned simple but undeniable truths during this period that drive sales and deployments in the ECM suite market to this day. Usability matters. Usability drives adoption. Adoption drives the ROI, whether the desire is efficiency and cost savings or revenue generation and customer satisfaction. Vendors: know your buyers! Buyers: know your users!

As the BPM suite market evolves, it will face technology convergence, vendor consolidation, and the need to decentralize capabilities to achieve the enterprise sale -- as did the ECM suite market before it. Complex, hybrid business processes, i.e. those that merge data + content + straight-through processing + human-driven interaction requirements, require collaboration and interactions that "cross the divide" between IT and the business.

How can business managers -- the compliance officer, the human resources manager, the account manager, the underwriter -- work with technologies for modeling and rules management, business intelligence, performance management, and analytics within familiar environments? Complex, hybrid processes increase the need for the business to create, view, interact with, and optimize the process through its execution and inevitable exceptions.

Debates on whether savvy Excel business users can "do modeling" aside, increased BPMS vendor messaging on providing common, "Visio-like" interfaces for process modeling, "zero-code" BPMS, integrations with Microsoft Office, and collaborative "business user-oriented" dashboard environments point to a market that is evolving to answer one of the more critical business buyer questions: -- What does it look like and how easy is it to use?

Putting the business in BPM underscores the "usability matters" mantra. A solution that cannot demonstrate it to the savvy business buyer at the ECM/BPM intersection -- who envisions an environment where ECM and BPM are seamlessly complimentary -- should probably think twice before the demo.

Posted by Leonor Ciarlone at 4:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 7, 2006

The ECM and BPM Intersection: Defining "More Than Simple" Workflow

As a former glue person, I spent numerous hours trading acronyms and definitions with IT analysts on the subject of data and process modeling in the content versus data worlds. Circa 1999, my friend Bob Boeri and I even went so far as to relate logical data models and data dictionaries to DTD structures, using Near and Far Designer as analogous to the more entrenched data modeling tools.

Our goal was to create "common ground" between IT's deep but solely data-centric view of business applications and the needs of various business units whose focus was decidedly document-centric. Once our "data is content and content is data" analogy was mantra, we had an easier time with subsequent process modeling discussions; i.e. "what we want our content to do with your data" and vica versa. (Reminiscent of those "how did your chocolate get into my peanut butter commercials")

In the ECM and BPM intersection, those discussions are once again becoming commonplace as more and more complex business processes require hybrid combinations of unstructured content, structured XML content and traditional data from back-end systems. Hence, information analysts that work with IT and business units must define a common knowledge base of process modeling requirements, flows, and techniques.

More than simple workflow (a.k.a "create, edit, approve, publish"), process models for functions such as compliance, claims processing, and contract management need to combine data-centric techniques with the content-centric, human-driven interactions these functions require. In fact, just as data sources are now hybrids, so too are the processes that require, manipulate, and share them. The BPM suite market is increasingly adding simple document management functionality at the business monitoring level to account for content-centric requirements.

More interesting is the market's approach to workflow, which still appears either data-centric or document/content-centric in terms of standards modeling languages. In fact, a BPM suite vendor’s architecture choice for process modeling and execution is also a clue to their data versus content strengths via support for XPDL (XML Process Definition Language) versus BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). Highlights:

XPDL – initiated and managed by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), XPDL is decidedly human workflow-centric and more oriented for document-driven processes. No surprise that workflow, document management pure-plays, and some ECM players with BPM modules have strong XPDL modeling and processing engines. More info at WfMC.

BPELSource

OASIS

One of the more significant questions at the ECM and BPM intersection is, "Where is the best of both worlds in terms of process modeling for complex workflow that is a human and data-driven hybrid?"

Posted by Leonor Ciarlone at 9:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 26, 2006

The ECM and BPM Intersection

We've been monitoring acitivity in the BPM market with an eye on the connections between ECM and BPM technologies as they apply to content-centric business processes and applications. The evolution of BPM suites has been particularly interesting and in many ways, analogous to the patterns that formed the current ECM suite market. Technology convergence, vendor consolidation, a full slate of interchangeable acronyms, and rising levels of market confusion surrounding the definitive list of suite-level components are all evident as the BPM suite market continues to define itself. Sound familiar?

BPM suites are clearly an emerging market. Broadly defined as the ability to model, execute, simulate, and optimize business processes, the market consolidates technologies such as analytical modeling, rules design and execution, workflow, data aggregation, and process optimization into a single platform vision. Numerous pure-play BPM providers within each technology segment are evolving toward “the vision” in different ways.

I am positive that this is not a "never the twain shall meet" situation when it comes to content strategies and ECM technologies. Process and content are siblings; it is only a matter of time before many of the isolated technologies that support both will merge in a more tangible manner than simple workflow. This kind of ECM and BPM intersection is more complex than the traditional integration of the BPM market's straight-through processing (STP) expertise with data-centric, transactional content. Rather, it will be an emerging focus on what we view as process content, or content that travels through a complex, human-driven, interactive, and iterative lifecycle.

EMC's acquisition of ProActivity is a tangible indicator of this evolving intersection, demonstrated as well by BEA's acquisition of Fuego, FileNet's ongoing investment in its BPM components, the progression of DM/BPM players such as Global 360 and Hyland Software, and Lombardi Software's integration with Microsoft Office. Stay tuned for more as the market heads toward cohesive vertical and horizontal solutions -- critical for both traction and helping the user community understand implementation value. We'll keep you posted.

Posted by Leonor Ciarlone at 8:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

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